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Monday, 3 December 2012

Mediaeval Baebes: new album and cathedral dates

On 5 November 2012 Mediaeval Babes released their new
album. The album will be supported by the following UK dates.

December:

8 Norwich Cathedral

13 Gloucester Cathedral

14 Ely Cathedral

15 Peterborough Cathedral

21 St Sepulchre-without-Newgate (the National
Musicians Church)

It’s fifteen years since the Mediaeval Baebes first
appeared, adding a layer of knowing glamour to the sometimes fusty world of
early music, shamelessly trading in baebe power to the delight of a public that
lapped it up even as some of the purists sniffed. In the intervening period,
Baebes have come and gone (and even been born), and what was once an
imaginatively presented niche act is no longer an outlier. In Britain and
beyond young musicians have reconnected with a folk tradition of strangeness
and storytelling and the power of their unadorned vocals sounds more
contemporary than ever. No wonder The Huntress, their seventh studio album,
contains a version of ‘Cruel Sister’, the old murder ballad that was the title
track of both Pentangle’s 1970 album and the Unthanks’ 2005 debut.

Katharine Blake, musical director and leader and now
the sole original Baebe, is delighted with the results. “It’s been more
satisfying, more realised and closer to what I hear in my head.” Although she
describes producing, writing, performing editing and mixing as “a recipe for
insanity”, The Huntress was worth the struggle. Loosely themed around the idea
of ‘feminine energy’, the adapted sources which Blake has arranged for female
voices range from Byron’s ‘She Walks In Beauty’ and Ben Johnson’s ‘Queen and
Huntress’ to the mediaeval Arabic poetry of ‘Clasp of A Lion’ and old Latin of
‘Dianae’ (‘Of Diana’ the huntress, and appropriately pronounced DNA). ‘Jennet’s
Song’ uses a transcript of the famous Pendle witch trial as a lyric, while less
tragically ‘Care Away’ tells of a henpecked husband (and features The Mediaeval
Bloakes, an impromptu choir of musicians and friends). References to the moon
abound, unsurprisingly.

Blake considers the two discs that make up the album
to split between folk and classical, the first record perhaps more accessible,
the second part more esoteric. And with familiar songs like ‘Cruel Sister’ and
a take on standard ‘She Moved through The Fayre’ as well as the instantly
familiar ‘Lenten Is Come’ and newly penned, notably percussive ‘Cathedral of
Song’ she has a point.

Yet the divide is not always obvious. ‘Veni Veni
Bella’, already accompanied by a video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0v7nv2s3tQis perfectly appealing, despite the archaic Latin lyric. The
‘Moorish jazz’ of ‘Clasp Of A Lion’ is eerily exotic (‘panting gazelle in the
clasp of a lion’, indeed), while its sister piece, the knowingly spooky
‘Phantom’, where Esther Dee’s high vocal terrifies while an ancient groove is
laid down beneath, genuinely defies time and genre. Concluding with an
arrangement of ‘Dies Irae’, the Catholic doomsday hymn, it’s hardly lightweight
stuff.

“It’s a choir. And it’s a band,” says Blake, neatly
summing up the Baebes unique dichotomy. And it’s not like anything else. Asked
if she can hear anything of her music in any contemporaries, Blake might
compare a particular song or effect to Philadelphia’s Espers, Steve Reich’s
systems music or even the other KB, Kate Bush. But The Huntress is truly sui
generis.